Page 54 of Bounced!

That was the plain, enormous honesty of the man, laid on the couch between us like a third mug. I couldn’t meet it with a wall. He’d earned better. He’d earned the one true thing I’d been keeping behind my teeth all night.

“I need to say something,” I said. “And I need you to not make it a big thing, because if you make it a big thing, I won’t get through it.”

He went still. “Okay.”

“I don’t do this, any of it.” I kept my voice even, the way you keep your hands steady carrying something that matters. “I built my whole life so I’d never have to. I have a dog, a chair, and my books. There’s nobody in that life who could leave, because nobody was let in. That was the design. It was a good design. It’s held a long time.” I looked at my tea instead of at him, because some things I could only say to a mug. “Then I raised my hand, and my perfect plan’s been coming apart ever since, brick by brick. I let it, because I decided you were worth the mess.”

“Dante—”

“Let me finish.” I breathed. “I don’t have your practice at this. You’ve loved people and lost them and loved again. I locked the door at twenty and threw out the key. I called it strength. So when I say I want this, I’m not saying it the easy way. I’m saying it the way a man says it who’s never once said it and is half sure he’s forgotten how.”

The house was quiet around us.

“So be careful with it,” I said. “That’s all I’m saying. Don’t go slow, necessarily, just careful, because I don’t have a spare. This is the only one I’ve got, and I’m handing it to a man who can’t work a dating app. I need to know you understand what you’re holding.”

Mark didn’t say anything. After an eternal moment, he leaned down and set his mug on the floor, slow and deliberate. Then he closed the cushion of sense between us and took my hand off my own knee and held it in both of his big, scarred hands, a life of building things in them. He looked at me with something so steady it undid the last of me.

“I take care of what’s mine, remember?” he said. “You’ve watched me do it for years. I don’t lose the things I decide to hold.” He took a beat. “I’ve been careless with plenty: my back, my sleep, my own heart, once, when Wes had it. I won’t be careless with you, Dante.” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “I don’t know the word for what we are, and we don’t have to pick one tonight, but you’re mine, and I’m yours. I’d sooner take Reina apart with my bare hands than give you a reason to wish you’d kept that door shut. I can do careful. Careful’s the one thing I’m really good at.”

He’d said Wes’s name plain, in the house Wes used to live in, and didn’t flinch from it. I understood he’d handed me something breakable back, on purpose, so we’d each be holding the other’s fragility.

And I believed him.

That was the thing. I’d spent a lifetime not believing anyone, reading every room for the exit or the threat; but in that moment, I sat on that couch and believed a gruff, graying man with my hand in both of his, and the wall I’d spent thirty-nine years keeping in good repair quietly stopped mattering.

“Okay,” I said, and my voice wasn’t quite level, and I let it not be.

“Okay?”

“Okay. We don’t pick a word. We just do it. On purpose. Carefully.” The corner of my mouth went up. “And if Benji makes us a banner, we let him.”

Mark laughed, wet and surprised. “He started the banner this morning. There’s glitter.”

“There’s always glitter.”

We were both laughing then, the tension breaking, his hands still around mine, the cushion of good sense mostly gone. We were suddenly two men who’d said the hard thing with the lights on and lived through it.

He was still laughing when I moved. I don’t fully know what came over me. Two years of watching him and never reaching, one night of letting myself, and something in me that had been so careful for so long decided it was done being careful for the night.

He was mid-laugh, easy and open, looking at me like I’d hung the moon and a few of the better stars. I set my tea on the floor next to his coffee, and I closed the last of the distance the way I’d closed it at the bar, except this time nobody was watching and nothing was in the way.

I came up over him on the couch, crawled, graceless and certain, and planted one hand on either side of those big shoulders. I watched his eyes go wide, watched the laugh die into something else, and I settled over him. Our gazes locked. I pressed my mouth to his before he could say a word about it. He made that sound again, the low, wrecked one. His hands came up to my back like they’d been waiting there the whole time.

“Dante,” he got out, against my mouth, breathless, delighted, undone.

“You talk too much,” I said as I kissed him again.

I felt him stop talking, then I felt the careful thing in me and the careful thing in him agree, without a single spoken word, that the conversation was over.

Chapter 18

Mark

Dante’s weight settled like a massive sack of sand pressing me down into the couch. I could barely breathe. And I loved every second of it.

Our lips crashed together, all waves and no shore. His hands gripped my shoulders, then drifted to squeeze my arms, such a different sensation than when the twinks had done it at the bar. My own hands found a home on his back, fingers digging into the ripples of corded muscle crisscrossing every inch of his frame.

His mouth drifted lower as he sucked my bottom lip. No one had ever done that to me. A jolt of pain—the kind that made my cock leap into action—spread from my lip to my mouth to my jaw. I dug my fingers into his back and was rewarded with a low growl that vibrated my chest.